“There are a lot of loudmouths out there, people saying ‘repatriate, repatriate—get all this looted stuff out of museums and give it all back to the people it was looted from,’” said Christopher Marinello, founder and chief executive officer of Art Recovery International, a London-based organization whose clients are varied but some of whom possess cultural objects that were stolen from somewhere in the developing world. Would that private and museum repatriation were so simple.

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One of those clients is a private collector who purchased from a dealer several 19th-century wooden Congolese masks belonging to the Luba tribe in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This collector “knows that they probably were taken out of the country illegally and that they really shouldn’t belong to him, and he wants to give them back.” The problem is that Marinello has tried to find responsible people—perhaps someone from the Luba tribe or a government official—to take them, and no one will. “I contacted the embassy in London and in the Congo, and no one returns my calls or answers my letters.”

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has experienced intermittent civil war for much of the last 30 years, and the most likely recipient of these masks would be “a warlord who will sell the pieces.” Otherwise, he noted, “I just can’t find anyone from the Congo or a suitable museum to accept them.”........

© Observer